B K Karkra
Man has been in relentless search of immortality since the times immemorial. Permanence, however, is the jealously guarded preserve of God. No one has ever been permitted even a peep into this Divine portal. Not only the physical being, but even the memories have a limited shelf life— common man can ordinarily hope to live in memory only till his grandchildren are around. Ever increasing longevity is very much within the realm of reality, but immortality is certainly beyond anybody`s reach. Even all the man-made Gods and prophets would live only till our earth does not disappear into some cosmic black hole. Only the God who has who has made man and all else would always be there. Besides Him, ‘atman’ (soul) is also believed to be indestructible, because it is an inalienable part of ‘Paramatman’ (God).
Both seers and scientists have been after the cosmic secrets for ages. They have tried to unravel the mysteries of life and universe in their own preferred ways. The intricacies of what lies within us are no less wondrous than the mysteries of the cosmos. If and when our scientists are able to solve the question of consciousness— they hope to do so by the end of this century— it would certainly be a big leap forward for man to chase his illusion of permanence further.
Consciousness is something what the Upanishads refer to as ‘atamn’ or soul. This is what makes you feel that you are you. Nobody else can be ‘you’. Besides, we are human because we think— ‘cogito, ergo sum’. Deciphering of consciousness would, therefore, lay bare a good part of the mystery surrounding life. After all, this is the quintessence of our being— the seat of self-awareness, social-sense, emotion, memory, reasoning ability and even personality. Body is just a casing for consciousness and mind really is the place where man lives. If the contents the brain could be preserved and taken care of separately, body would go disposable.
Our first curiosity with regard to consciousness would naturally be to know exactly where in our body it is lodged. Our heart is just a pump and liver, a purification facility— though we are often made to feel, as if these organs have something to do with the pulsations of our inner self, particularly the sensation of love. In the 17th century, a French philosopher, Reni Descartes thought that this life-force lay in the pineal gland of the brain. However, the view now is that it lies somewhere in the complex circuitry of the neurons called the spindle cells. Whatever be the truth about these findings, one thing is quite clear that consciousness has its home in brain. It is a kind of software that gets processed in our brain which itself could be construed as hardware. The two are thus integral to each other.
If science is to proceed further from here, it would have to first locate the exact spot in brain which deals with this mystical phenomenon. The next stage would be to decode the information on these nerve cells and download this on some super capacity computers. The whole thing could be viewed this way: A baby is born with a blank memory (His memory disc may well be carrying baggage from his past life also, but that is not retrievable in the ordinary course). Right from the first breath, the child begins receiving messages from his surroundings through his sensory organs. Thus, a plethora of sights, smells, sounds, flavours and feelings make their way to his memory and start getting accumulated there. In course of time, the processing power of the brain also comes in to play and he starts reacting to events in line with what lies embedded in his brain i.e. his experiences.
Consciousness can thus be considered as just another sensory organ or the sixth sense. Anything perceived through this sixth sense means that the brain has already worked on the issue in the light of the data stored therein and arrived at a solution, but the necessary calculations done by it have completely faded from its memory screen. This leaves us with a feeling that things are going to happen in a certain way, but we really do not know why.
Similarly, a computer mimics the human brain. It has a C.P.U. corresponding to the processing power of the brain and RAM for memory. Computer gets inputs through its keyboard, imaging and voice modulations, while brain gets these through the sensory organs. Computer displays the results on its monitor, whereas brain does it through speech, sketches, bodily expressions and actions etc. The computing ability of the supercomputers has already touched around 1% that of brain.
The scientists from various disciplines are currently on the job of networking computer with human brain, so as to be able to download and upload data from one to the other. The effort is thus at digitizing the brain and replicating consciousness. At the moment science has very little purchase on the idea. Yet, the pace at which the computers are evolving and the tremendous progress made in the intricate areas like the genetics gives the hope that, sooner or later, consciousness would also get decoded.
We are told that the Cole Polytechnique Federale de Lusanne of Switzerland (EPFL) has already started making efforts to replicate a neocortical column of brain on an IBM computer. If this works, a number of such simulated cylindrical columns would be linked together to understand the working of what is known as the ‘grey matter’ in the brain. Once this is successfully done, the mysteries of consciousness would start getting unraveled.
Aubrey de Gray is of the view that a person who is to live 150 years may have already been born and the one who may live for 1000 years is in the coming in the next twenty years. In his lecture before the British Royal Academy of Science, he said that all this would be brought about through ‘gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other medical techniques’. Progressive longevity of life may, therefore, be well within the grasp of man.
Ian Pearson, the head of the futurology unit of the British Telecommunications, is hopeful that by 2050, computer technology would have advanced to a stage where it would be possible to download the contents in a person`s cranium on to a supercomputer. Once this happens, it would also be possible to upload this digital copy in another brain. Initially these simulations may be crude and hazy, but these would get satisfactorily refined with time. The process would also get less laborious and may eventually come within the reach of common man. It is not difficult to understand the staggering implications of this development, related as it is to the overall ‘beingness’ or personality of a person.
Ray Kutzwell, in fact, goes to the length of asserting in his book, ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ that the current generation could be the last one to experience terminal death. The biological puzzle of death is thus waiting to be solved. Our mortality is presently tied to the durability of our hardware i.e. brain. Death occurs when this system crashes, just because it is not yet possible to save its contents (consciousness). If, sometimes in the future, it becomes possible to port the mind-file on to some back-up device, the human battle against mortality would end in a significant victory to man. The prospect is, undoubtedly, fraught both with promises and perils that are impossible to predict immediately. Just imagine, finding yourself in another body and seeing your own body laid in front of you!
Science is simultaneously trying its hand at creation of artificial life and also in the area of the Past Life Regression Therapy. (The PLRT works on the basis that the experiences of past life lie embedded in a corner of a man`s brain incognito. These could be recalled to remedy his psychological ailments of this life, following him from his past life). However, even if man achieves some breakthrough in the field of digitization and preservation of consciousness, immortality would still not be there in his grasp— what if this earth itself gets sucked in a cosmic black hole one day or the digital copies of consciousness get infected with some virus? Man may continue to push his frontiers of knowledge, but God is not going to lose even a bit of His greatness. After all, even brain is not our own creation— it is also a gift from God.
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